Comment by sametmax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sametmax | Hacker News Reader

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Another problem is that no society is perfect. And even if it were, it won't stay that way.

There is a need for a small grey area in any system to stay sane, where people can workaround the limitations of said system.

Yes, it will be abused, and also used for nefarious purposes. But it's better than the alternative.

You need people to sometimes be able to do things the state doesn't approve. You need children to be able to mess around without parent knowing. You need to be able to go to a gay bar without living a trace. You need to be able to give cash to a homeless without him being part of the system.

Also if you make it very hard to try new things that are illegal or immoral now, your society will get stuck and lose a lot of opportunities to evolve.

Yes, it would be better to change the system to make it better first. But it's a slow and unreliable process, especially if you can't prove that your way is ok. So having little pocket of experimentation is important, and cash allows that.

Fantastic comment, this is to me the crux of what makes privacy so important.

"How could people have decided that marijuana should be legal, if nobody had ever used it? How could states decide that same sex marriage should be permitted, if nobody had ever seen or participated in a same sex relationship?"

https://moxie.org/blog/we-should-all-have-something-to-hide/

There is a need for a small grey area in any system to stay sane, where people can workaround the limitations of said system.

There is a similar analogy to what is happening in the computing world, and I've heard it called "the insecurity that gives us freedom." I agree.

This comment and its parent are both excellent. I've often heard security and freedom described as a tradeoff; the idea of a causal relationship is intriguing.

Where did you hear this from? When I google search for this phrase, I only see your Hacker News comments.

I totally agree, but I wonder if physical cash is really the only way get there.

I fear that trying to keep a cash infrastructure in place will turn out to be a futile effort because it is so expensive. Long before cash is completely gone I bet that almost everyone who needs it will be priced out of actually using it. Also, cash has the downside of not being usable online.

The problem is that I know of no government wise enough to legislate/regulate in order to keep all the very important things you mention. Right now these possibilities exist only because they are side-effects of the physical properties of cash.

I suspect that once we really do lose cash, some sort of grass roots replacement will emerge (cryptocurrencies?). The danger is that it will be something that lends itself to money laundering and tax evasion on a grand scale. That would make it far too high risk for the purposes you're talking about.

The best solution I can think of is a constitutional right to make and receive smallish payments anonymously and a constitutional obligation for all vendors to accept one such form of payment that is available to everyone.

That would make cash one option without equating the struggle for a right to anonymous small scale payments with a specific solution that is easy to reject because it is so expensive.

No electronic system is safe enough to guaranty secret because it depends on too many other systems.

It would just be a trojan horse for total control.

In fact, it would allow big actors to pretend giving freedom while in fact having perfect discreet local control when they want.

At least with cash, it's clear when you face a hostile system.

I don't think it is technically impossible. But the likelihood of pushing through the necessary constitutional changes to protect any right to such a system is extremely small.

Unfortunately the longer term likelihood of retaining a cash infrastructure is equally small, at least as a realistic, effective and affordable option to pay for what people actually want to pay for.

I doubt you can ever eliminate "cash," but only make it worse. For example, prisoners can't have cash, so they use cigarettes or cans of mackerel as a medium of exchange and store of value. They're heavier and bulkier than cash, but they work the same. I think any barter system will inevitably develop a "cash," because sellers want more potential buyers, and buyers want more places to shop.

>I doubt you can ever eliminate "cash," but only make it worse.

Isn't it pretty bad that you can't use cash to buy online? Cash is becoming far less useful than it once used to be because more and more things can only be bought online or cost a lot more if you don't.

This argument was made in the Battlestar Galactica tv series as well. Nicely put.

Barack Obama put it nicely I think:

"We have to assume that if a system is perfect, then it’s static. And part of what makes us who we are, and part of what makes us alive, is that we’re dynamic and we’re surprised. One of the challenges that we’ll have to think about is, where and when is it appropriate for us to have things work exactly the way they’re supposed to, without surprises?"

Great comment. Came here (to try) to say exactly this.

You can have a local virtual currency and good ol' US dollars.

Very insightful comment.

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